How To Setup Your Vacation Message

Note. This page doesn't apply to people who use hermes email. See here for more info. DAMTP users should add an alias to the hermes webmail vacation settings to make emails sent to crsid@damtp.cam.ac.uk send out a vacation message e.g. b.smith@damtp.cam.ac.uk NOT bs123@damtp.cam.ac.uk - this gets done already.

The following will explain one way to achieve this, for more information and to read other ways of achieving the same goal, please look at http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/internal/computing/email/vacation.html.

Save the file below to your N: drive, your samba drive (don't save it in any directories, just to the root of N:). Because it's a plain text file, you can't simply click on the icon below like a normal web page link, your browser will simply display the contents of vacation.txt instead of offering the 'Save As' option. To save the file, you need to right click the icon and choose the 'Save Target As' option if you're using IE or choose 'Save Link Target As' if using Mozilla.

- vacation.txt.disabled

You can edit the text within the vacation.txt.disabled file to say what you want. Edit it with Notepad or Wordpad, don't use programs like Word as this could add the extension .doc to the end of the filename (e.g. vacation.txt.doc) and stop your vacation message from working. What is within this file is what people will be emailed while you are away. Be careful if you start putting dates into the text. You don't want to start emailing people a message that says you'll be returning back to work sometime last year just because you forgot to change the files contents after you came back from last years summer holiday. Keeping the file contents simple and date free means you won't need to edit it ever again, just change the file name. To edit the file, you can use Notepad or emacs if you prefer to edit in Unix.

How to enable and disable the vacation message

To enable the vacation message simply rename the vacation.txt.disabled file to vacation.txt. You can do this using unix (mv vacation.txt.disabled vacation.txt) or using Windows Explorer or My Computer on your Windows Pc. As soon as the name has changed, the vacation message is working. You can now go away on holiday and forget about it. When you return, to disable it, simply rename vacation.txt back to vacation.txt.disabled, again, you can use Unix or Windows for this.